Viruses: Created, Evolved, or Both?

[Data]

I'm somewhat more conversant on the subject than evolution and I thought this was an interesting question from an atheist vs theist perspective. Did God create viruses or did they evolve. My position is both. God created them and in the microevolutionary sense they evolved.

[mgb]

[Replying to Clownboat in post #12]
There's a lot more to evolution than that.

If you disagree with my definition, please explain so I can amend it. The reply you made does not foster debate being as vague as it is.

You are talking in terms of the Gene-Of-The-Gaps hypothesis: If something is not explained assume the gene done it. Little Lisa is able to play the violin at 3 years of age. How so? Must be the 'violin gene' etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. Show me proof that genes do all these things and are the basis for evolution in the way they are supposed to be.

[The Barbarian]

A thing can be both created and evolved. Evolution IS creation.

Right.

The real question is, is evolution a sentient process?

Is a market economy a sentient process? Or is it just that God created a world in which such things organize themselves into self-regulating processes?

Viruses my be a non-living automatic process on a molecular level, too primitive to be compared to more advanced created/evolved creatures.

How sophisticated does a self-organizing molecular process have to be, in order to qualify as living? I have no idea.

[mgb]

Is a market economy a sentient process? Or is it just that God created a world in which such things organize themselves into self-regulating processes?

Insofar as individuals in the economy are making decisions I suppose it is, on that level.

How sophisticated does a self-organizing molecular process have to be, in order to qualify as living? I have no idea.

I'm not sure where to draw the line but if a creature is aware and sentient it is life, surely.

[The Barbarian]

Is a market economy a sentient process? Or is it just that God created a world in which such things organize themselves into self-regulating processes?

Insofar as individuals in the economy are making decisions I suppose it is, on that level.

How sophisticated does a self-organizing molecular process have to be, in order to qualify as living? I have no idea.

I'm not sure where to draw the line but if a creature is aware and sentient it is life, surely.

A true market economy is such that no one individual can significantly affect it. The beauty of market economies is, they work, even if no one has any idea of what is happening.

And how do we measure awareness and sentience?

[mgb]

A true market economy is such that no one individual can significantly affect it. The beauty of market economies is, they work, even if no one has any idea of what is happening.

And how do we measure awareness and sentience?

Yes I believe Nash wrote about how economies balance via game theory. He won the Nobel prize for his work. But I don't see what the economy has to do with evolution. Maybe it is an 'ecology' of sorts but that's something else.

One way to deduce sentience is to interact with it.

[The Barbarian]

A true market economy is such that no one individual can significantly affect it. The beauty of market economies is, they work, even if no one has any idea of what is happening.

And how do we measure awareness and sentience?

Yes I believe Nash wrote about how economies balance via game theory. He won the Nobel prize for his work. But I don't see what the economy has to do with evolution. Maybe it is an 'ecology' of sorts but that's something else.

One way to deduce sentience is to interact with it.

Thing is, market economies efficiently tend to allocate goods and services without anyone knowing anything about it. Evolution tends to increase fitness of populations to environments the same way. Notice I wrote "tend to"; it doesn't always work, but usually it does.

Your test for sentience was first formulated by Alan Turing. He thought that if you conversed with an entity over wire, and couldn't distinguish it from a person, then by all reasonable standards, the entity would be sentient.

With AI being what it is, I think it's too low a bar.

Darwin, BTW, was influenced by Adam Smith and the "dismal science" when he was formulating his theory of natural selection:
https://austrian-institute.org/en/blog/ ... es-darwin/

[mgb]

[Replying to The Barbarian in post #26]

Yes, there is a kind of natural selection in industry. If a better version of a car is made it will survive in the market place and the older version will tend to be left behind. But the mere fact of Natural Selection is not evidence that genes do all the things they are suppose to do. Genes and Natural Selection are very different aspects of evolution and evidence for one is not necessarily evidence for the other. So people talking about 'mountains of evidence' for evolution need to specify which aspect of evolution the evidence supports.

[Difflugia]

Genes and Natural Selection are very different aspects of evolution and evidence for one is not necessarily evidence for the other. So people talking about 'mountains of evidence' for evolution need to specify which aspect of evolution the evidence supports.

That's an odd statement. Evolution as such is just descent with modification.

Evolution requires a means to transmit traits from one generation to the next and a mechanism by which those traits can change. The traits themselves are together called phenotype. The traits are an expression of the genotype, which is also the means for the inheritance of traits. The modification of the genotype is mutation and there are a number of mechanisms by which that occurs.

The problem is that mutation is overwhelmingly random, but the pattern of modifications through lines of descent is not. There must be a mechanism that transforms random changes into the nonrandom evolutionary patterns that we see. That mechanism is natural selection.

All three of those mechanics together are sufficient to explain evolution. Is that what you mean by "very different aspects of evolution?" Evidence for evolution is evidence that each of those mechanisms exists, coupled with evidence that they operate in concert. Since we do, in fact, have mountains of evidence that each of those mechanics is real, I'm not sure what your critique means.

[Clownboat]

If you disagree with my definition, please explain so I can amend it. The reply you made does not foster debate being as vague as it is.

You are talking in terms of the Gene-Of-The-Gaps hypothesis:

You are wrong. I provided a definition for evolution and you failed to show where you disagreed with it, therefore my definition stands.

[The Barbarian]

[Replying to The Barbarian in post #26]

Yes, there is a kind of natural selection in industry. If a better version of a car is made it will survive in the market place and the older version will tend to be left behind. But the mere fact of Natural Selection is not evidence that genes do all the things they are suppose to do.

What do you think genes are supposed to do? They code for proteins. That's it. Natural selection is not genes. It acts on genes.

Genes and Natural Selection are very different aspects of evolution and evidence for one is not necessarily evidence for the other.[/quote]

Genes being directly observed in protein synthesis is evidence for them. Evolution being directly observed in populations is evidence for evolution. They are both observed facts.

So people talking about 'mountains of evidence' for evolution need to specify which aspect of evolution the evidence supports.

Darwin defined evolution as "descent with modification." After genetics was founded as a science, it was "change in allele frequencies in a population over time." Both are observed facts.

I think you've confused evolution with common descent. YEC Dr. Todd Wood:

Evolution is not a theory in crisis. It is not teetering on the verge of collapse. It has not failed as a scientific explanation. There is evidence for evolution, gobs and gobs of it. It is not just speculation or a faith choice or an assumption or a religion. It is a productive framework for lots of biological research, and it has amazing explanatory power. There is no conspiracy to hide the truth about the failure of evolution. There has really been no failure of evolution as a scientific theory. It works, and it works well.
https://toddcwood.blogspot.com/2009/09/ ... ution.html

YEC Dr. Kurt Wise:

Evidence for not just one but for all three of the species level and above types of stratomorphic intermediates expected by macroevolutionary theory is surely strong evidence for macroevolutionary theory. Creationists therefore need to accept this fact.
https://creation.com/images/pdfs/tj/j09 ... 16-222.pdf

Neither of these scientists accept common descent; they prefer their YEC beliefs to the evidence. But they are too honest to deny the evidence.